Software Engineer, Photoreal 3D at Mirage · LumiJobs
$175k–$300k
H1B: no
Mirage Software Engineer to build photorealistic 3D rendering capabilities in Tesseract, a Rust-based cross-platform graphics and media engine. Define architecture and implement physically based rendering models for film-quality output.
Responsibilities
We want Tesseract to render 3D that is indistinguishable from footage. You'll be the founding engineer for photoreal 3D in Tesseract, our Rust-based, cross-platform graphics and media rendering engine.
Tesseract already renders video, motion graphics, effects and compositing in a color- managed pipeline. You'll build 3D to the same standard: a fast interactive preview for editing, and a physically based final render, path-traced or hybrid ray-traced, that produces film-quality frames for export. Both run from one scene, material and lighting model, so what people see while they edit is what they export.
Scenes are authored by people and by AI agents, so render cost, failure modes and APIs matter as much as image quality. This is a foundational role: you'll make the core architectural decisions and help build the team around them.
Define the architecture for photoreal 3D: how ray tracing, rasterization and denoising divide the work, and how that maps onto Metal, Vulkan, Direct3D and WebGPU.
Build light transport: global illumination, reflections and refraction, soft shadows from area lights, and volumetrics such as haze, fog and light shafts.
Build a physically based model for materials, lights and cameras: energy-conserving materials (metal, glass, clearcoat, sheen, translucency), lights in real-world units, and a camera with exposure, depth of field and motion blur.
Own image quality: sampling, antialiasing, accumulation, denoising and firefly suppression, with frames that stay stable and deterministic across a video export.
Scale scenes to production complexity with acceleration structures, instancing, culling and memory management, for millions of triangles and tens of thousands of objects.
Integrate 3D into Tesseract's video, motion graphics and compositing pipeline, including ACES color management and render passes such as depth, normals, motion vectors and light groups.
Make render cost predictable and rendering robust: performance budgets, profiling, and headless batch rendering on local and cloud GPUs.
Design 3D APIs that work for people and AI agents alike: a clear scene representation, actionable validation errors, fast previews and render cost known before the render.
Work with engine, product and AI teams, and help hire and grow the 3D rendering team.
